Will the combination bring benefits?

On July 28, JetBlue announced that it had reached an agreement with Spirit Airlines to buy the discount carrier for $3.8 billion in cash ($33.50 a share). Just the day before, Spirit canceled its merger agreement with Frontier Airlines, which had made an inferior offer to JetBlue (lower total value in cash and stock). The deal would keep JetBlue solidly positioned as the fifth largest U.S. airline (based on Similarweb data on web traffic) while eliminating a destructive price competitor.

The deal adds pilots and planes and eliminates competition, but does not seem to be large enough or anticompetitive enough to be blocked by regulators.